Can local, vertical search get bigger than Google?

The next Google-killer is always on the horizon; recently, analysts have hung …

Every few months, someone wonders aloud whether local and vertical search providers will one day kill off Google. These companies offer specialized searches within specific locations or industries; if targeted search results are what you seek, these may provide better answers than a general query. The most recent proponent of this theory is Jason Prescott, who argued last week that "specialty search engines could one day become more important than Google."

Prescott's main point is that general search doesn't always work very well. Using other data, he claims that only four out of ten business professionals are satisfied with the results they get from places like Google and Yahoo. This creates a niche that can be exploited by more targeted search engines that index only specific businesses, for instance, or that concentrate solely on local search.

It's a claim that's been made before, in 2006 and 2005, yet niche search products have done nothing to stop Google's growth or market dominance.

On the other hand, that's not the point for most of them. By its very nature, vertical search is a niche product that will never replace Google's main engine. Instead, the goal is to whittle away at the edges of the Google empire. The obvious danger to the smaller firms is that Google will simply enter the local and vertical search markets with a vengeance if they pick up much traction.

Google has already made these sorts of moves, though still in a limited way. Google Co-op has the beginnings of a vertical search engine orientated around broad categories like "health," and Google Maps has already turned itself into a nice tool for doing local searches.

While these tools (especially Co-op) pale in comparison to other targeted search engines like Zillow, which allows users to search for property values, they do show that Google has its eye on the upstarts. Will they one day dethrone the king?